Assam

Book Review: Tea by Roy Moxham

February 20, 2012 |

Author admin

I read a very informative book recently about the history of tea from a British perspective: “Tea, Addiction, Exploitation and Empire” by Roy Moxham (Carroll & Graf, New York, 2003). This book is full of surprising facts. Did you know, for example, that tea was fashionable in Portugal, Holland, and France before it caught on in England? Or that Sri Lanka is a tea producer because of a fungus that ruined their coffee crops? Or that the history of tea is about as nasty as it got in the British Empire?

The book begins with an account of how Moxham, as a young man, landed a job running a tea plantation in present day Malawi in East Africa, and the book ends with an account of his year there. In between, we go predominantly to China, India, and Sri Lanka as Moxham tells the often gruesome tale of the history of tea in the British Empire. Moxham is not the most colorful of writers, but the book is obviously well researched, and once I’d picked it up, I found it hard to put down. I don’t find that the old block prints, photographs, and drawings add much to the book, but I do like the maps in the front of the book that show tea plantation locations in Malawi, China, and India.

It may come as a bit of a surprise that the violent history of tea in the Empire is still playing itself out, with sporadic strikes and violence continuing to this day throughout Sri Lanka and India, especially in Assam. And then there’s the Sri Lankan civil war where the descendents of Tamils imported from India to work the tea plantations still feel discriminated against by the Sinhalese.